Scripture Reading: Luke 6:17-26
Jesus is traveling the countryside of Judea. His teaching and healing is becoming widely known, and he is attracting large crowds of followers and of detractors.
Today’s reading is the Gospel of Luke’s
version of what we call the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew – the series of
blessings on broken people that introduces the Sermon on the Mount. Luke’s version differs from Matthews in
several ways, including that in Luke the sermon is preached on a level plain at
the foot of the mountain rather than on the mountain, and in addition to giving
blessing to the poor and the broken, in Luke Jesus also offers a warning to the
rich and the well-off.
One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles: Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
He went down with them and stood on a level place. A large crowd of his disciples was there and a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and from the coastal region around Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. Those troubled by impure spirits were cured, and the people all tried to touch him, because power was coming from him and healing them all.
Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed
are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and
reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.
“Rejoice
in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven, for that
is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
“But
woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors
treated the false prophets.”
Meditation
Debie Thomas, in her lectionary blog called Journeying with Jesus, says this of the reading: “Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, sad and expendable. Woe to you who are rich, full, happy and popular. This week’s Gospel in a nutshell. Boom.
"What [Debie asks], are we to do with this reading? What should we specifically – we who are comfortable and privileged – do with this reading?”
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In Jesus’ day as in ours, many people are taught a message of exclusion from the table, and they internalize it. They are taught and they believe that for one reason or another, or a whole bunch of reasons added up, they do not fit and do not belong on the same level as others. That they do not have as much to offer as those whose lives are more together and more accomplished in the eyes of the world, and who therefore seem more blessed and favoured by God.
But Jesus says here that in the way we set places for people at the table, we dare not confuse the standards and the judgement of the world with the good will and purpose of God.
As a starter, just look at where Jesus is to be doing what he is doing. He is teaching, healing and preaching – living out the kingdom of God on Earth and inviting to experience it firsthand, not up on a mountain separated from the common ground, above and apart from others, but down on a plain, on a level playing-field where none is above or below another.
And what he establishes is not a closed meeting, a gated community, nor an exclusive club. Rather, it’s a wide-open gathering of whoever is there, in whatever spirit they come, with whatever needs, need to be met and whatever gifts need to be nurtured.
Recently I was talking with a minister, now retired, about a church she served in which there was a young woman in her mid-teens who was having a hard time fitting in. Because of her special needs and mental challenges, she was not accepted by her peers and couldn’t keep up with them. Neither was she comfortable helping with younger children. So, she was quite alone and struggling about whether to even stay in the church.
The minister saw this, and one month asked the young woman to help her with the communion service – to come forward at the appropriate time in the liturgy, and help break the bread for the congregation. Bravely the young woman agreed, and it went so we well that every month after, it became her role in the congregation’s worship to break the bread alongside the minister. The minister spent time helping her understand what it and other things meant, and month after month that marginalized young woman had a place at the table of God, and helped make it a real table of God and of real communion for everyone else.
That’s one side of the revolution that Jesus puts into words in today’s reading. The other is the logical follow-up to it: Woe to you who are rich, full, happy and popular.
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In Jesus’ day as in ours, many people assume, believe and teach that wealth, good health, and worldly success are signs of God’s favour and evidence of faithful living. And if you want even more of these things, just keep following Jesus as best you can, and he will bless you.
But Jesus says no, and challenges every thread of blessings theology and prosperity gospel that people try to weave and cover themselves with. Those who are well-off and well-liked, Jesus says, have a challenge, because God’s kingdom on Earth does not promise prosperity, success or even pleasure. Rather, the way of God’s kingdom is to let go of what separates you from others, in order to engage more fully and deeply with all. It’s not about being stronger, smarter, better or better off; it’s about being vulnerable, open, interdependent and generously, self-givingly loving.
Just as surely as being poor and broken does not make anyone less a friend and servant of God than others, he says, being rich and successful nurtures the sort of self-satisfaction and self-centredness, and the kind of separation from others and from God’s love for all, that Jesus has come to undo.
Karl Olsson once summed it in a nice image in a book he titled Meet Me on the Patio. Just as those who are ground down and kept down by the world are invited to come up from the basement and have a place at the table, so those who are elevated in the world are invited to come down out of the towers of status, power and privilege to meet the others on the patio of our common humanity, and join in the party of God’s inclusive kingdom community.
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What can this mean?
If we learned to do this in the world on a big scale, it would change everything. Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “I have a dream, God says. Please help me realize it. It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, it greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts, when there will be more laughter, joy and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing. I have a dream that swords will be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, that My children will know that they are members all together of one family, the human family, God’s family, My family.”
On a small scale, I think of a decision made by our Church Council at the time we were completing the installation of the elevator in our building. “Spirit Lifter” we called it. And near the end of the project, Council decided not to put up a plaque on which specially large donations by individuals would be honoured by acknowledging different levels of support that were given. They firmly believed that someone whose sole contribution may have been to give four hours of time to help sell pies at the Peach Festival so the Women of Fifty would have extra funds to contribute, was every bit as valuable and part of the family effort as someone who maybe gave hundreds or even thousands of dollars to the project.
On Tuesday I helped lead a small, private funeral for one of our families, and on the way back from the cemetery to the funeral home, talked with one of the funeral staff about why we like helping with funerals.
What I like, I said, is that when I hear what’s shared about the person who’s died and what’s cherished about them, I am reminded of how well life can be lived and what our lives mean to others, regardless of who we are and our station in life. What he likes, he said, is the reminder of how many unsung and unreported saints there are in the world. People whose life stories, whose generosity of spirit, whose love for other people, whose little daily acts of sacrifice and openness to others are never reported in the paper or seen on TV or made a big deal of, but help make the world a good and lovely place to be for others around them, regardless of their occupation, their circumstance or their means.
In the service that day, the funeral home had included in the slide show of images of the person whose life we were celebrating, this little saying: “To the world, you may be just one person; to another person, you may be all the world.”
So, blessed am I when the circumstances of my life open me to loving openness and interdependence with others.
And woe to me, when my life-circumstances nurture and encourage within me a spirit of separation, self-defence and exclusion.
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